What's Up Dock?

I enjoy a pun as much as the next guy, but I don't usually plan my birding forays around one. Today, however, and I want to emphasize that this was solely my lovely wife's idea, we took, on Easter Sunday, in homage to Bugs Bunny, a "What's Up Doc(k Road)?" trip. This was something of a reprise of our Ocean County road tour that we did with Pete Bacinski a couple of weeks ago.

The Forsythe Refuge, in addition to its flagship reservation known to all as Brig, stretches over 30 miles up the coast, incorporating large sections of marsh along the various bays up to Brick. We decided to see what was up on, north to south: Cedar Run Dock Road, West Creek Dock Road, and Parker Run Dock Road which all run through sections of the refuge. Cedar Run Dock Road is the most well known of these roads, famous for its Short-eared Owls in fall and winter. The other two are birded, at least from the evidence on eBird, much less frequently.

We spent the most time on Cedar Run Dock Road mostly because there are more places to search. Most interesting bird there was a single Greater Yellowlegs close to the road in a shallow pool. Along the 2 1/2 miles of marsh and creeks we found:
Canada Goose  5
Mallard  5
Greater/Lesser Scaup  X
Bufflehead  20
Hooded Merganser  2
Red-breasted Merganser  1
Red-throated Loon  1
Pied-billed Grebe  1
Horned Grebe  1

Horned Grebe
Photo: Shari Zirlin

Double-crested Cormorant  4
Great Egret  2
Osprey  1
Northern Harrier  1
Greater Yellowlegs  1
Herring Gull  10
Rock Pigeon  3
Mourning Dove  1
Fish Crow  1
Song Sparrow  3
Northern Cardinal  1    Heard
Red-winged Blackbird  X
Boat-tailed Grackle  X

Next we drove about 2 miles south on Rt 9 and turned left onto West Creek Dock Road. West Creek itself had one Horned Grebe and 3 Pied-billed Grebes and a few Hooded Mergansers.
New birds we added along this road were
Brant  2
Common Loon  1
Pied-billed Grebe  4
Turkey Vulture  7
Great Black-backed Gull  3
Blue Jay  1    Heard
Tree Swallow  4
European Starling  4
Shari took what she calls her "obligatory Osprey picture," while I documented what is possibly the most hideous building on the Jersey shore, what is known locally as the "Plywood Palace." There is a lot of gossip about why this house remains unfinished; I prefer to think that a bad idea can only go so far and this is as far as this one went. Another hurricane might be a mercy killing for this monstrosity. 

Our third Dock Road is simply listed as "Dock Street" on the maps. You can see where this can get confusing when you're looking for a street at 40 mph. It is 8/10 of a mile south along Rt 9, and officially known as Parker Run Dock Road. 

Not much new along this road although we did a get a very nice look at a Belted Kingfisher.

So, that wrapped up the joke. The weather was starting to deteriorate but we wanted to keep going so we decided to investigate one more Forsythe property called Graveling Point. This area is south of Great Bay Boulevard and reached by turning right off Great Bay onto Radio Road. On the map it looks like Radio Road winds through evermore marsh. The map must be old because Radio Road is built up with luxury condos, a small mall, and all the other trappings of suburbia. However, it does, like most roads down there, end at the bay. By now the water was pretty choppy, but in a small pond separated from the bay by a thin strip of beach we saw 3 Snowy Egrets (Shari's first for the year) and a few Laughing Gulls were mixed in with the ubiquitous Herring Gulls.

We drove back to Whiting as the weather continued to cloud up and get more blustery. Where to have lunch on Easter? At a Chinese restaurant on Rt 530. We were the only customers but the food was good enough to eat. Re-energized, we decided to go out to New Egypt. The  lapwings haven't been reported the last few days, but I wanted Shari to see the Pectoral Sandpipers and the Wilson's Snipes out in field.

As we were packing up, another birder pulled up and broke out the optics. I realized I knew her, though we only met once, when I saw her daughter with the binoculars too. It seemed appropriate for us to meet on Easter, since she published on line some research she'd done on lapwings including the factoid that they may be the origin of the Easter Bunny!

In England and Europe the eggs of plovers (the family to which lapwings belong) were (and still are to some extent) both eaten and collected. Lapwings don't dig their own nests--they use old rabbit burrows. Someone finding a lapwing egg in a burrow would also find bunny fur around the egg. Hence, the myth of the Easter Bunny's eggs.

It's a great story and if it isn't true, if I tell it enough times, it might be.

At the cattle field in New Egypt our list was:
Canada Goose  1
Black Vulture  10
Turkey Vulture  10
Sharp-shinned Hawk  1
Sandhill Crane  2    
Killdeer  4
Pectoral Sandpiper  3    
Wilson's Snipe  9
Rock Pigeon  20
Eastern Phoebe  1
American Crow  2
Northern Mockingbird  1
European Starling  10
Red-winged Blackbird  100
Common Grackle  5000
Brown-headed Cowbird  100

Five thousand grackles flying overhead is impressive and a little worrisome--you've got to figure that at least one of them is going to let go. For the day we ended up with 45 species. And the rain began shortly after we got home.